The 73-year-old Baptist minister remembers peering over the lectern of Fourth Baptist Church in the city's Church Hill neighborhood and seeing Wilder and other members of his family slip into the back pews when weather or a late start prevented them from walking across town to their own church.

"They would slip in this door and sit in this section," Taylor says, pointing to the rear door and the pews closest to the Wilders' home, just across the street from the church at 28th and P streets. "I don't recall any of the Wilders in any other section."

Then it was convenience that brought Wilder to Taylor. Now it's connection.

That's the sense the people of Church Hill have as one of their own, a black youth from an average family in a then-average neighborhood, is ascending to the highest office in their state. He's risen, but he hasn't left home, they say.

It isn't the same Church Hill Wilder lived in. The home Wilder grew up in was so rundown that it and the rest of the homes on its block were torn down more than 10 years ago. Modest one-story homes have replaced them. But just a block away more blighted homes, junked cars and garbage line the streets.

Still, in the barber shops and the churches, the schools and the homes of Church Hill, there is quiet excitement and wonder.

WILDER'S PARENTS came to Church Hill when James Wilder, a slave who had to live apart from his family because they were owned by a different white family, built a home for his wife and 14 children after they were freed.

Wilder, born Jan. 7, 1931, describes their life as "gentle poverty." His father was a short, dapper insurance who never left home without a coat and tie and supported his family on $50 a week.

Influenced by mother Beulah's love for education, Wilder attended Virginia Union University, then following a tour in the Army during the Korean War, earned a law degree from Howard University. After a brief stint in the Newport News law firm of W. Hale Thompson, Wilder went back home to Church Hill to practice.

Soon he was involved in politics and won a state Senate seat, becoming the first black in the chamber since Reconstruction.

"HE HASN'T CHANGED a bit," says 59-year-old Rudolph Morris, sitting in a barber chair in a shop without a sign and a broken barber pole a few blocks over from P Street. He talks while he gets a haircut to wear to his childhood friend's inauguration: "He loved to talk. We always felt he'd be a good lawyer."

Morris says Wilder is one of few people who still call him `Eagle,' his nickname from the days of pickup football and horsing around after school.

As a young man, Wilder visited the barber shop to discuss politics and debate the older men who gathered there. Some of the men are still around.

"When he doesn't come in, we go looking for him," says Thomas Alexander, 50, who inherited the shop from his older brother. Alexander used to cut Wilder's hair in this chair, when as a young attorney, Wilder had an office in the neighborhood.

OTHERS WITH MEMORIES of Wilder are returning to Church Hill to renew their connections.

Frank W. King Jr., a year behind Wilder in high school and college, brought his in-laws with him to visit the site of the old Wilder home across the street from Fourth Baptist.

"We may not even get to shake his hand, but it's just nice to be a part of history," King says.

Verna W. Stevens will remember the inauguration through newspaper clippings and television images.

She sits in her Buick Regal in the parking lot of a mall just outside of Church Hill. She's engaged in one of her favorite recent pastimes, reading about Wilder, her former pupil in the seventh grade at George Mason Elementary School. She says she'll later clip the newspaper article and save it.

"He was an excellent student," she says of young Wilder.

Stevens says she received a special invitation to the inauguration, but she's going to give her ticket away. She doesn't want to sit outside in the cold with her arthritis.

"I'm excited. I'm proud of most all my students," she says. "They could read."

Wilder overwhelmingly won a mock election held at the school Nov. 7. The school's principal wrote to Wilder with the results of the election and explained that the 36 votes for Republican J. Marshall Coleman might have been the result of first-graders who confused a candidate by that name with a cafeteria worker in the school.

"We think they thought they weren't going to get fed," jokes Barbara Perry, the school guidance counselor.

The fifth-graders in Ida Fields' class weren't so easily confused. Ten-year-old Alicia Keys says Wilder is her role model: "I want to be the first lady governor."